Reviews

I was trying very hard to watch Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life." After seeing two hours of completely non-intersecting footage, such as unexplained looks of 1. anguish, 2. fear, 3. depression, and 4. wonderment, with none of these being connected in any sort of palpable manner, I started to feel faint/distraught myself. There were mundane scenes of a tyrannical father at dinner with his family, then a shot of a family of hammerhead sharks, then a volcano, then sunspots. This is not art. This is a man confused about his cinematic intention. Is this a National Geographic video, a ripoff of 2001 – A Space Odyssey, or a takeoff on Archie Bunker? This is not cinematic genius. This is either an example of unbelievable self-indulgence, or psychosis. It's a lot harder to make a movie that has a plausible storyline than it is to merely make a two-hour series of free-associations. The latter requires no intellectual rigor, vision, or discipline. The mystery to me is how Malick is able to get backers to indulge him and finance such unwatchable, narcissistic claptrap.

Rather than present at least a GLIMPSE of Tolstoy's brilliance, Christopher Plummer depicts him as a one-dimensional, gruff, lovable old coot. He hardly has any lines throughout the movie, and the other characters are equally devoid of any depth. Helen Mirren's character is supposed to be self-centered and calculating, but even she breaks down into saccharine lightness at the end. The entire film is a descent into maudlin, pretentious sentimentality, and is only atmospheric, not substantive. Instead of being an accurate portrayal of early 1900's Russia, we are given "Russia-lite." We don't have a clue about Tolstoy's inner thoughts and motivations, because we see only an affable geezer. This was a squandered opportunity to reveal the mind of a complicated, social visionary. The director chose cute over interesting.

I have just seen the most ridiculous "movie" ever made, and I use the term movie quite loosely. Is there no expectation any more that movies should have SOME plot, story, sequentiality, or plausibility, or are they just total indulgences on the part of the director? Rather than watching a compelling, evolving storyline that INVOLVES you and draws you in, instead we witness the work of 18 year-old computer whiz kids in front of their consoles, churning out meaningless, special effects displays. One feels like a bystander on the sidelines, and the experience of watching something like this is both boring and irritating. "Inception" is the most confused, convoluted, ridiculous assemblage of scenes ever put on the screen. At one point there were simultaneously 1. shots of people underwater in a van that had just gone off a bridge, 2. men shooting each other with machine-guns while skiing, 3. men fighting each other in a hotel hallway while floating in the air defying gravity, and 4. a scene with Leonardo DiCaprio at his house talking to his wife. The camera kept alternating quickly between each scene, but each one had nothing to do with the other. It was like watching a movie preview, with random, unconnected scenes thrown out in rapid succession, meant only to entice you to see the movie. Not only did scenes bear no connection to one another, they also had no relation to the scenes preceding them, and thus there was absolutely no follow-able story line at all. There was nothing but c.g.i. effects meant, I suppose, to "entertain" us. Do movie makers not realize that special effects, in and of themselves, do not hold one's interest if there is no connection between them and some conceivable storyline? You might as well be watching a cartoon. As with a cartoon, unless you're five years old or brain-impaired, you would become bored within five minutes, because there's no ongoing, developing story demanding your attention.

Since Quentin Tarantino is now an established motion picture director, it seems that he can now get away with just about ANYTHING! Witness the mind-numbing, jaw-dropping moronic dialog between John Carradine and Uma Thurman at the end of Kill Bill Volume II:

Carradine (after being given a death blow by Thurman): Pai-Mei taught you the five-point-palm exploding heart technique! Why didn't you tell me?

Thurman: I don't know. I guess I'm just a bad person.

Carradine: No, you're not a bad person. You're a g-g-g-g-good person.

Does Tarantino PURPOSELY write such hackneyed dialog or is he just merely verbally challenged?

I had mixed feelings going into this movie. I had seen the television documentary on Frank Lucas, and wondered how the movie could improve on that. But what a knockout film. During the middle of it, I was worried that it was devolving into a standard drug bust-shootout movie. But the ten minute dialog between Washington and Crowe was mesmerizing. The thrust and parry, each one psychologically circling the other, figuring out the weak points and strengths of the other in deciding how to negotiate with each other, the mutual caginess and respect, was fascinating to watch. Why couldn't the rest of the movie have more of this intelligent, absorbing kind of tete-a-tete?

This gem is excellently acted, especially by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and even Ethan Hawke, who is usually a little smarmy for my taste, but not here. But there are two cinematic conceits going on here. The first is minor and forgivable, that Hawke and Hoffman don't look at all like they could be even remotely related. The second conceit is more egregious. Generally, there are three reasons one could be attracted to someone: 1. That person has a wonderful personality, 2. That person is wealthy, or 3. The person is gorgeous. The character that Hoffman plays in this movie is none of the above. He is a white-collar middle-class drone, 2. He is overweight, and 3. He obviously has a horrific personality. To add insult to an already non-credible coupling, we have Marisa Tomei who is obviously drop-dead gorgeous. What was Lumet thinking?